Former Steelworks Site in Redcar

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Marion Fellows

Wednesday 14th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) on securing this important debate.

I want to speak about my constituency’s experience of a steel plant closing down, because there are valuable lessons to be learned from it. The Ravenscraig integrated steel mill closed 26 years ago in 1992. That was before devolution, so there was no Scottish Government and all industrial matters were dealt with by the UK Government. In the mill’s last two years, 4,400 people—mainly men—were laid off. Unemployment stood at 15% shortly after the closure and is still higher than average. The constituency still does not have the same number of highly paid and highly skilled jobs that it once had. The former MP for Motherwell and Wishaw, Frank Roy, did a lot of work to try to re-energise and rework the Ravenscraig site and led on a proposal to build a new town on it, but that has never come to pass because of recessionary pressures and local resistance.

Ravenscraig is slap bang in the middle of my constituency, between Motherwell and Wishaw town centres. The SNP Scottish Government made it a national priority in 2007, and lots of money has been poured in from various funds and resources. Ravenscraig Ltd was set up as a joint venture between Tata, Scottish Enterprise and Wilson Bowden when the plant closed. The site now has a new college, a new regional sports centre, less than 1,000 new homes—although more are being built—a pub, a hotel and a building research centre. There are proposals for more new homes and for a civic park. In 26 years, we have not come a terribly long way, given that it is a 1,400 acre site, most of which is covered by roads that do not necessarily lead anywhere yet.

I do not want to sound too pessimistic—as the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke) said, we need to have hope—but when something as big as the Ravenscraig integrated steel mill closes, that is a hammer blow to a community. Not much help, if any, was given by the then Conservative Government; I hope that the Redcar site does not suffer the same fate. North Lanarkshire Council—of which I was recently a member, as the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Hugh Gaffney) still is—is spending quite a lot of money on trying to make the site viable.

As the council’s new chief executive, Des Murray, says, it has always been recognised that there needs to be a redevelopment site at Ravenscraig, because it is of symbolic strategic significance, but we cannot live on symbols. The hon. Member for Redcar talked about Redcar as an iconic site, as was Ravenscraig, but people cannot live on such sites. People do not get jobs just because sites are iconic. There needs to be real and continuous development.

I do not want to paint too gloomy a picture, because there are improvements. The new Ravenscraig regional sports centre has hosted international and national events to great success, and the new houses there are lovely. The site building is now creeping forward, and in April there was another planning application put in for a more modified, and probably more likely to be built, new area in Ravenscraig, which now includes industrial and retail centres as well as two primary schools and development of the civic park. This is all good news, but I have to warn people in Redcar that it takes a long time and does not necessarily lead to the kind of jobs that have been lost.

[Alex Cunningham]

The hon. Lady is giving us a good illustration of why we need big, fast decisions and investment now. I am sure she will agree that Redcar cannot wait 20 years for the Tees valley to secure the good, well-paid jobs that we need. We do not want service jobs; we want good, well-paid jobs like we have had in the past—that needs decisions now.

[Marion Fellows]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I do not have a solution; I can only lay out what has happened at the Ravenscraig site. People have been doing their best, but the recession in 2007 really bit into developments there. When things get delayed, they do not always come back again, which is a real worry for everyone.

I give credit to North Lanarkshire Council, as I always do when it does things right, for continuing to work on the site and for trying to get more investment into it, but I fear that, with Brexit apparently here, this is going to be an ever-growing challenge to local agencies and authorities. Motherwell and Wishaw were iconic not just for Ravenscraig; there were always steelworks in my constituency. The fact that the Scottish Government managed to save what is now Liberty Steel—the DL works—and, in a neighbouring constituency, Clydebridge, is testament to the work that they have done and are trying to do.

We need steel. When I was first elected to Parliament, the all-party parliamentary group on steel and metal related industries was the very first one that I joined. I fought hard to save the steel industry in my constituency, and that was achieved. Ravenscraig does not make steel—it simply rolls plate—but it is still there. That is thanks to the work of the Scottish Government, who were determined to save that site and as many jobs as possible—not only the workers, but, more importantly, the apprentices who were working on the site at the time. It will be interesting to hear whether the Minister can give the same commitment to the industry in England and Wales. There are no longer steelworks in Redcar, but we need these iconic industries at our backs if we are to move forward as a group of countries.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland for saying that everyone has to work together, which I think everyone realises. It is not a party political issue when something like this happens, but things do move ahead on party political lines. We have to be cognisant of that fact, and people have to keep putting pressure on the Government to make decisions and to treat the area favourably, even if it is not recognised as a really good area for their party.

I go back to 1992, when very little was done by the central Government to support Ravenscraig and the workers who lost their jobs. I moved into the area shortly afterwards, and all I could hear was tales of when the steelworks used to be open and how Motherwell and Wishaw were such thriving, wonderful places. It took a long time for the towns to recover. They still have not recovered totally, because the jobs that people do now are completely different. I think that is what is found in Redcar, too.